Guests: Eric Maxwell (LinkedIn) | Steven Kim (LinkedIn)
Companies: Google Cloud (Twitter) | Qarik Group (Twitter)
Show: Let’s Talk

The 2023 Accelerate State of DevOps Report, the annual report from Google Cloud’s DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) team, has recently been released aiming to provide insights into what drives successful software delivery, operational performance, and organizational performance. DORA Core has also been released, which pulls together the key findings over the nine years of research to help organizations with their transformational efforts.

In this episode of TFiR: Let’s Talk, Eric Maxwell, DevOps Transformation Practice Lead at DORA and Google Cloud and Steven Kim, CTO at Qarik Group, go into depth about the key findings from the latest State of DevOps report and what makes organizational cultures successful.

Key highlights from the video interview are:

• The research is in its ninth year and the goal is to understand the capabilities that drive specific outcomes such as what drives software delivery, operational performance, and organizational performance.
• DORA has just released the DORA Core, which represents their key findings over the years. Organizations can use the findings as a guiding compass to help them make decisions when considering technology or organizational changes. DORA Core shows the findings over the years, what has worked and what has not, and how to apply the research.
• Maxwell talks about the five key takeaways from this year’s report: having a healthy culture is crucial, adopting a product mindset and focusing on the user is a key indicator of successful teams and organizations, quality documentation amplifies technical abilities, using cloud without flexible infrastructure causes a decrease in performance metrics, and they looked at individuals that identify as underrepresented and how work distribution affects those people.
• Maxwell talks about the different organizational cultures saying that it usually isn’t a technology problem but a people process issue. He discusses the types of culture that experience the highest level of success, such as having high levels of cooperation and low levels of hierarchy.
• Kim feels that there needs to be a balance between the technological part and the cultural part of an organization and sometimes you need to compromise on the technology to make up for the organizational weaknesses.
• Technology also has the potential to affect organizational change in a positive way, whether that is supporting project and team structures or providing opportunities for flexibility and visibility.
• Maxwell talks about the four different clusters that emerged in the data this year: user-centric teams, feature-driven teams, developing teams, and balanced teams. He discusses how the types of teams with the highest levels of performance and lowest levels of burnout were the user-centric teams and balanced teams.
• Kim tells us about their pilot model approach to bring about change within organizations and being more cognizant as they build and make pushes with developing teams. Maxwell notes that developing teams who are driven by getting code out and PoCs out may also be more susceptible to higher levels of burnout.
• Kim and Maxwell share their recommendations for organizations that want to become more productive, such as creating a continuous improvement mindset. They talk about not getting bogged down in the metrics and rather using them as a gauge to help them understand where they are and what they are trying to achieve.

This summary was written by Emily Nicholls.